My CDCD experience has been a rather unusual one. Right from the beginning, everything changed. That set the tone for what to expect i.e. the unexpected. I couldn't have known that was going to happen but I should've. Life is always strange in this way, taking on forms of its own, doing things you wouldn't have realized.
I chose a journey that began with Barcelona. At La Bonne. That's what I had imagined. It seemed like the perfect place to dive deeper into my fabric and fiber research, to uncover colonial narratives connected to West Africa's textile history. Barcelona, Tunisia, Cyprus. Perfect. But no. Life had to happen. It always does; it always happens. Who cares about my plans anyway?
Anyway, long before this journey was set to begin, I was informed that Barcelona was out of the question for me. La Bonne was a women-only residency space. They couldn't host me. I respected that wholly. I only wished it was clearer from the beginning that that was the case. I don't remember seeing it anywhere in the documents, and it wasn't very clear to me when I checked out their websites for their programs. Perhaps that's fully on me. My research wasn't deep enough. But anyway, things had to change.
I had to explore other options. My local partners, Nubuke Foundation suggested some offers which I believe were presented as recommendations from the larger CDCD team. Who knows. That was my guess. Now it was a question of Madrid or Rome. In the end, Rome was the pick. Personally I would've preferred Madrid. But who cares what I want? Life isn't all about what we want individually I guess. The collective had decided. Rome made more sense, was easier and was more straightforward. Especially because the entire CDCD group of resident artists and facilitators were meant to meet in Rome for a Capacity Building program to kick-off the whole program. So I'd just stay in Rome for a month after the two-day Capacity Building program.
Simple.
So that's exactly what I did. And where we met for the Capacity Building program, The Museum of Civilizations (Museo delle Civilta) was exactly where I was going to spend my time for the residency. I wouldn't live there obviously, but I would spend a majority of my time in Rome there, going through vast collections of stolen objects and artifacts, leafing through texts and having conversations about difficult colonial histories. How fun. I didn't realize how much it'd all end up weighing on me, but I just did it. That's what I had to do. After all I was doing research. I had to engage with these difficult narratives. I had to learn. I had to take it all in and find a way to respond to it all. With art.
At the museum, I encountered so much. So much pain. So much injustice. Important cultural objects from my motherland put away in boxes, locked up in cages, away from those that were meant to engage with them. Far away from those whose lineages are connected to them. I had to reflect on the fact that many people who were born of the lines of people who crafted the stories behind many of the artifacts would never see them or learn about them. My heart broke into many little pieces everyday, but I had to gather the pieces and stitch them together awkwardly with a feigned smile as reinforcing glue. I couldn't take it but I had to try; I had to take it. Someone had to be in that position, and it happened to be me.
I couldn't run away, I couldn't abandon ship. It didn't even cross my mind then, but looking back that was quite silly. I should've recognized and made space for the part of me that needed the escape. The escape from the cold, brutalist architecture, the escape from the colonial brutalities I had to engage with everyday, and the escape from extractive energy. But, silly me, I kept going, not realizing that I was bottling something up which needed to be let out. Someway, somehow.
And so I went on and on, doing the same thing, having conversations with my fellow residency artists until it was time to go to Dakar for the Dakar Biennale, where I would be participating. It was going to be a much welcome break from Rome and all the difficult histories I was engaging with every waking day. Even though I enjoyed life in San Paolo Basillica and walking around the streets of Rome, seeing history everywhere, I was excited to leave the cold and head back to the motherland. The land I was from. Even if I was going to visit a part I wasn't quite familiar with. Even though it was going to be a completely new place, I was looking forward to it. Looking forward to Dakar, to art, and to seeing some old familiar faces as well. The warm sun I had missed so badly might be what would make me feel whole again.
And it would be my first time visiting Dakar and participating in this Biennale. I was eager. I was also keen to do some art-led comparative study between the Museum of Civilizations in Rome and the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar. "How exciting," I thought. Breaks when on residencies aren't very common, and frankly don't seem very advisable, since they halt one's getting-to-know a place. But this one felt right. It complemented my residency. It made my research better and deeper and richer.
And so when it was time to go, I was very glad. I would also have time to review all the material I had been capturing and absorbing during the first few weeks in Rome. It was a lot of material--images, videos, writings, drawings, audio recordings--and the plane rides and the airport layovers were the perfect time to engage with this vast and dense material for a brief while. From Fiumicino to Humberto Delgado and from there to Blaise Diagne, I would have all the time I needed to review, reflect and reimagine. Is that what happened in the end? Not exactly. But to a large extent, my mind began to find relaxation amidst the chaos of travel.
And so when I arrived and was received by my friends in Dakar, I felt a deep ease that was impossible to find in Rome because of the nature of my work and experience there. I settled right into life in Dakar. The biennale beckoned and I had to prepare. Amidst all that work, I made time to create art that spoke to my experiences in Rome. In fact I had already began doing that in Rome as well; creating collages, drawings and writings that reflected on the colonial histories, the loss of indigenous knowledge, the disconnection from nature, the disconnection from self. I'd began reflecting on all this stuff through my art. It's the only way I know to deal with all this information. This overload that is almost never ending.
How does one carve out meaning in all this mess? How does one synthesize all that is constantly coming at us? For me, it is art. Art is always the way. Art is how I transmute and transform and alchemize all the madness. And that madness was evident in the halls and on the walls of Museo Delle Civilta. It almost drove me mad too! Believe it or not.
So in Dakar, I continued to make art from and with the maddening material from Rome. I made some for myself and I made some and shared with the world. "Digital Reflections" of my reflections on Rome. How sweet. And in between these creative acts, I made time to see as much of Dakar as I could within the few days I was there. I visited Goree Island, The African Renaissance Monument and of course The Museum of Black Civilization as well. And of course, I made time to engage with some contemporary art as well to understand from an emotional point of view how artists of today were reimagining life and telling stories of their time here.
Dakar was inspiring and quickly became one of my favorite places to be. Maybe that was heightened by how tense things felt in Rome? Who knows. I can only say this looking back. But it was great. Great to connect with other artists, unexpectedly ran into some familiar faces and just engage with rich art. It was a bit strange and unsettling to see artifacts and cultural objects displayed in ways that mimicked western displays, but at least I didn't feel the sense that I was dealing with narratives that tried to water down the significance of these objects and the people behind them. It felt less painful and less violent. Naive, if anything, and definitely unburdened with the weight of theft and pillaging. We were just showing to each other, to our brothers and sisters, what other brothers and sisters from this very land held dear. And we were doing it in the way that had been presented to us as the norm. Maybe this isn't critical enough, but who knows and who cares? This is what it felt like then.
And so when it was time to have our works mounted for the biennale, engage with an audience and see everything in full display, I felt less broken and more encouraged. I can't say exactly why, but there was definitely a burgeoning hopefulness that was bubbling up. And so I left Dakar with a sense of renewal. Funnily enough shortly after arriving in Rome, the optimism was heightened a little bit more.
How?
Great question.
So the lovely facilitators of our residency in Rome, Gaia and Rossanna from Museo delle Civilta, arranged for us to watch Dahomey, a film directed by Mati Diop, which follows the 2021 return of 26 royal treasures, looted from the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin) in 1892, from French museums to Benin. It was a difficult watch not only because of the pain it portrayed but also because of the language barrier, but it made me feel hopeful that the folks to which some of these treasures belonged would get to reconnect with that which was theirs. The stories were for them to tell, and so it was good to see that the reversals necessary for that to happen were slowly happening. It echoed some of the sentiments I felt as I engaged on a daily basis with the displays in Rome's Museum of Civilizations. These objects, these beings, these stories were returning where they belonged.
Finally.
I had made plans to visit Barcelona shortly after returning to Rome. I wanted to visit the place of my original residency and also see a show about the Amazon at the CCCB museum. I had recently visited the Amazon a few months prior, and so for me this show was going to be a way to connect with it again and also critique the colonial gaze on a place with such rich indigenous history and knowledge. It was a way to deepen my residency research, even if it was removed from Rome, the physical locus of my residency.
In the end, I found the show to be incredible. It is impossible, in one museum exhibit, to capture the pluralities of the Amazon. One is almost destined to fail if that's their goal. Because the Amazon is so complex, multidimensional and vast. The people, their stories, their histories. The land, its layers, its life. The water, the air, the trees. The animals, their past, their struggles. The culture, the pain, the destruction. The regeneration, the revitalization, the hope. The Amazon is inexhaustible. Yet, somehow, in the magnificence of its curation, this show managed to capture so much of the depth of what the Amazon is, from extremely authentic perspectives in an immersive and experiential fashion, drawing from a plethora of mediums, techniques and modalities, without making the show feel overwhelming. One left that meandering, super-meaningful, well-designed labyrinth of an exhibition actually wanting more--not wanting the show to end.
In many ways, I saw glimpses of how difficult histories and contested narratives could be presented more thoughtfully. I learned a lot from that show and saw what was possible. I returned to Rome shortly afterwards to complete the residency brimming with new ideas and ready to explore new directions. My original idea of focusing on textile histories linked to colonialism had expanded. Now, and especially after learning about the story of the infamous Franciscan priest and explorer Padre Iluminato Coppi, I became more interested in the idea of myself as an explorer, with this residency as my process of observation, looking at how my day to day shaped experiences around and my understanding of a foreign people and how they presented and made sense of objects and histories from where I was from. I needed to shift the gaze. I needed to regard my role here in a different light; to synthesize what was going on in a different way.
It felt like the only way to capture authentically, the full breadth of my month-long exploration. And the more I thought through everything and looked back on the different strands of the stories, the more it felt like a fabric, a storied textile, in itself. And so my inclination became to create a textile that was representative of this journey and transformation. I wanted to capture what I'd learned about the hidden information embedded in Congolese textiles in my ensuing textile. I wanted to capture a semblance of my conversations with fellow CDCD artists Rafael, Bona, Elisabeth and others. I wanted a way to present the other creations that were borne out of this experience in the pieces that would come out of this project. Making a fabric felt right and felt compelling.
And considering that I'd previously explored the idea of encrypting information in textiles and viewing fabrics as repositories of information, the concept I was now settling on seemed like the way to go for sure. This is what I decided to present on at the very end when us three artists were supposed to make public presentations of our time in Rome with the museum's audience. Everything seemed quite clear for me and I even had examples of what would go into making the work, plus a digital mockup of how the final piece or pieces could be. The media that would influence the piece, the chronological narrative, the thinking behind the concept--everything had emerged very clearly to me.
What I didn't expect, when I walked up to the stage, while I was sharing these ideas, just past the middle of my presentation, was to breakdown in tears. I did not see it coming at all. It was many things, it truly was. It was the weight of carrying all that pain from the museum's violent collections, and seeing myself in the many stories on display there. Perhaps it was a release triggered by calling out the museum's hypocrisy through my fictional explorer diary entries. Perhaps it was just joy of knowing we were at the end mixed with the pain of knowing I'd miss my new friends. Maybe it was something else completely.
I don't know.
But what I know is that I wept, it felt necessary, I felt no embarrassment, and I knew I just needed a moment to let it all out and then continue (despite Gaia's repeated reassurances that I could stop and didn't have to continue). I felt something shift within me that day, and it has stayed with me and emboldened me. I didn't realize how much I cared, how much my emotions were intertwined with the sense of loss and disconnection that the museum and its collection symbolized. The erasure of memories that were and memories that could've been. Knowledge that could've formed. New ideas that could've arisen. All these things that never were, because of a westerner's gain. Why wouldn't I feel such deep pain?
I found a new level of self awareness. My heart, my art and my practice had evolved in their capacity to hold space. This happened to me after spending so much time in such a place. And so when I went off to Amsterdam to wrap up my European adventure, visited the Stedelijk Museum, engaged with other challenging histories, I did so on shifting ground. I'm still familiarizing myself with this new place and I'm not quite sure where on this new land my being will settle. But wherever it may be, I know I will capture a piece of it in the fabric I'm weaving as part of my reflections.